I don’t get it how a manga style online game is so popular.
If anything ESO should surpass both of them.
But I can’t get hooked on FF.Never liked games where they perform those acrobatic style running , jumps, combat ugh, (reason I don’t like demon hunter because of double jump, and manga style combat animation)
Wow has definitely by far the most polished gameplay for MMO. Problem ESO has. Every time someone mentions FF I imagine spiky hair model with sword 3 times his size
Speaking of trialing, maybe I’ll reinstall Final Fantasy if I can finish playing through ARR without having to pay a sub. I stopped a little bit after Good King Moogle because while I enjoyed the dungeons and raid bosses, the grinding between actual content was awful. Just the worst. I think it was maybe during WoD I tried it FFXIV and even I went back to WoD because I’d rather play Blackrock Foundry on a third character than have to pay for the privilege of grinding mushrooms (and not even for XP - because I was at the temporary level cap - but just because the game told me I had to actually play the next expansion).
ESO is right behind them too with Ashes coming soon (expected to be the biggest launch in 10 years). You know why? THe community is SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MATURE. Even LOTRO is making a comeback because the community is tolerable.
I can’t even stand FF14 but at least it has socially competent people.
I’ve been back 1 month and already clinging to a thread. With no dungeon finger you’re forced into the toxic gen z LFG channel which is UNBEARABLE.
I can understand your pov. But at the same time all that stuff has been a part of Final Fantasy for the past 20+ years, it shouldn’t be surprising.
FF14 is doing good because it does what OG Blizzard did with OG Wow, and thats fanservice. Lots and lots of fanservice. Aspects from every part of the franchise can be found in the game and thats a lot of the draw. Look at the new mount they added, which is a direct call back to FF4.
What does this even mean lmao. 
Yea I’m not a huge fan of that type of graphics and gameplay. Game wise it may be awesome , never played it , and I don’t think I will due the reason mention above.
Oh look…
Another thread were I have to wonder if the OP is a paid advertiser.
Nothing like a toon with 7 posts telling us how great the market competition is.
Interesting. It didn’t look to me from the article numbers that it actually surpassed WoW in subs when you add retail and classic together (which you should because it’s all one sub), but in any case the games have been very close for a long time now and so it isn’t surprising.
A few drivers.
One is WoW’s content drought.
Another is WoW’s design orientation towards competitive endgame instanced content, which appeals much more to some than to others (and also leads to lower participation during content droughts).
Another is a new generation of player, for whom WoW is very old and kind of passe. These are people who have no real link to the old WC story and characters and so on and are just as likely to get into a Japanese-style story as they are a WC one, so there is a bit of a generation shift there.
And the games play really differently – at least it has always seemed to me. I have enjoyed both, and played FFXIV both in the original version (which was bad) and in ARR and later (much better, obviously), but it has never had the same “hook” for me in terms of world/characters and so on. But it’s a polished game, and a newer one, and certainly for newer or younger players, or for players who do not like WoW’s competitive endgame-centric design, it’s quite appealing.
Overall the message here for the genre, though, is one of decline. MMOs are becoming a thing of the past, slowly. And that’s fine. Nothing lasts forever.
Fair enough. I mean, in an overall sense, I don’t like the anime aesthetic that much, which is why I’ve always been iffy on putting a lot of time into FF. But, if the gameplay is fun, it could keep me despite the aesthetic.
Having said that, ESO is also an MMO that I’m putting back into my rotation after playing only briefly in the past. It was fun…and believe it or not, I’m a cat person there too. I can’t help it. But, the Khajit actually look like cats.
Anyway, there’s a lot of stuff I’m going back to after an absence. Some have been years. Some have been since Shadowlands dropped because Shadowlands insisted on design that monopolized all of my time, which I won’t ever let happen again at the expense of the enjoyment of other games. And…of course, some new games as well.
It’s actually so nice to feel free from a game that insisted that I have no other games.
lol.
Ashes of Creation is going to be garbage. Their design philosophy towards the game is a total joke, and they don’t have anyone with real industry experience to tell their CEO that his ideas for the game are stupid and that the game will crash and burn if they alienate the masses.
The fact that they’re selling beta access for $500 and trying to milk thousands of dollars in MTX out of the “fans” who follow the game right now seems proof enough that it is mostly a “scam MMO”. It will eventually come out until other scam MMOs, but it will basically be a nothing and just not have any real impact on the landscape. The game is a joke.
Am I supposed to be shocked that a game in like an 8-month content drought doesn’t have as many active players as some other game with a new expansion on the horizon?
Yeah this is one of the big blunders they made with SL, really.
MMORPGs used to be “lifestyle replacement” games. That is, you had one of them you played, and you didn’t play other games, for the most part, because it was consuming. They were all like this – EQ, WoW vanilla/TBC, EVE, etc. You didn’t really “split time”, because if you did you got nowhere in them.
But the market changed a lot since that time. Now, it’s about having maximum fun with limited time. Blizzard gets that when it comes to its focus on endgame instances, to some extent, but the rest of SL’s design around that is so monopolizing and time-consuming that it is, frankly, an anacronistic design in its own way. Players today expect to be able to play multiple games and be satisfied with their progress and rewards in all of them – the games need to be built to be consumed in that size of content, and more flexibly in general.
WoW was more like that in Legion, and, ironically, even in the much-maligned BfA, than it is now. The design for SL is more monopolizing of the player’s time than many contemporary players are willing to accept or are interested in dedicating.
You sound just like I did. I have NEVER been a fan of the anime, weeb culture stuff. But I was deperate to find an MMO that was even decent and after all the hype around FF14 I tried it and was almost instantly hooked.
To anyone considering trying, a few warnings. A lobby game, FF14 is not. The focus is story, character progression, community, and story. If thats not your thing, then yeah…
I’m curious why anyone even cares about this stuff. I’d play an MMO with a pop of 100 if I liked the game. Hell, most of my time in WoW is entirely solo, WoW could have a population of me and I’d still log in here and there to do stuff.
The double focus on story sounds intriguing
Gamers caring about tier rankings, as applied to games?
Shocking.
It can not be overstated. The focus is on story first in that game to be sure. And their stories tend to be highly regarded.
Not to say there isnt a lot of great combat, class identity and stuff too. There definitely is.
I am in “vanilla” content if you will, called A Real Reborn or “ARR” and everyone says its the worst of all the versions but if it is the worst, then whats to come has to be amazing.
To be totally fair… most WoW Retail players seem to agree with FFXIV Fans in that assessment.
It really is. People need someone else to tell them whether they should be invested in or enjoy a game or not… it’s actually sad.
I can say FFXIV is absolutely flooded with WoW refugees right now. There are multiple guilds (called “free companies”) everywhere dedicated to WoW refugees. Everyone always commenting on how many new players there are right now.
I bring that up because the sentiment most have, I also share…is that leaving WoW is with heavy heart and honestly wished it wasn’t so. I don’t hate WoW or wish it to fail, quite the opposite.
But trying FFXIV has really opened my eyes about just what a dumpster fire WoW’s current direction and philosophy is.